Pages

Monday, 25 April 2011

a green Easter fling

Easter's always been one of my favourite holidays - I'm sure the fact that it coincided with spring and the end of the snowy Utah winters of my childhood have something to do with it. So this year when my gorgeous friend Jess suggested we have an Easter Feaster I 'hopped' at the opportunity. I offered to make egg bread and a ham, and endeavoured to make them as green as possible (green egg bread and ham!).

Egg bread is an Italian family tradition, and my favourite part of Easter brunch. It's dense, slightly sweet and baked in the oven with coloured eggs nestled in the braid of the ringed bread. I emailed Mom for the recipe and after some slight tweaking to the recipe, voila! Green egg bread for the Easter Feaster!

In addition to green coloured eggs I used organic flour, organic raw sugar, organic milk and organic free range eggs - some of it package free from the Co-op.

The ham was naturally harder to green because it's meat (the livestock industry is to blame for around 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions and uses 70% of all agricultural land on earth*), but I can't imagine Easter without a ham, so we looked for an eco-friendly one. Luckily pigs are not from the ruminant family (like those poor cows that constantly belch methane), and our friendly neighbourhood butcher explained his ham was from a free-range pig on their own local farm. I don't think it was organic, but at least we had a happy, healthy pig with a reasonably small eco-hoofprint.

I'm also happy to report that the rest of the Easter Feaster was a vegetarian affair (totally unplanned by me, so was a pleasant surprise) - a delicious salad by Beth and veggie empanadas by Jess - making it a very a green Easter Feaster indeed.